The sages and the world : categorizing culture in early rabbinic law
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This study treats two closely related interests in the early rabbinic legal canon: the practice of ethnography and the theory of culture. It argues that both were central to the early rabbis' own project as they defined and questioned the limits of their legal self-consciousness. It shows how they used legal categories to engage in ethnographic inquiry and to generate theories of culture by integrating descriptions with traditional norms, and, in the process, debating the relationship between law and culture as such. Further, this study identifies specific parallels and broad congruences between rabbis' uses of these categories and those of contemporary Greek and Latin sources; arguing not for influence but for similar kinds of curiosity, reflected in diverse genres of ancient knowledge-production, including exegesis, philosophy, and jurisprudence. Finally, this study analyzes how cultural inquiry shaped what it was like to be an early rabbi and a subject for whom this law was a formative worldview. Responding to recent arguments for the early rabbis' political marginality, this study asks what sense and use they made of that very marginality, reframing their role not only as authoritative experts but also as cultural observers and interpreters----including in the medium of law itself. Whereas past work on each category that this study examines--translated "magic", "manners", "the customary" and "local custom"--has applied interpretive dichotomies between accommodation and resistance, this study argues that their worldview is much better characterized as dialectical. It has both tendencies, but integrates them into a new orientation. In order to capture that orientation, this study articulates a widely applicable, fine-grained, context-sensitive theory of how rabbis integrated curiosity and traditional norms through law by creating discourses which mark, challenge, and theorize the fundamental tension between what people really do and what they should.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Redfield, James Adam |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Religious Studies. |
| Primary advisor | Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva |
| Thesis advisor | Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva |
| Thesis advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Deutsch, Nathaniel |
| Thesis advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
| Advisor | Bashir, Shahzad, 1968- |
| Advisor | Deutsch, Nathaniel |
| Advisor | Safran, Gabriella, 1967- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | James Adam Redfield. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Religious Studies. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by James Adam Redfield
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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